Introducing English Linguistics

Affricates.
English has two affricates, one voiceless and the other voiced:
/tʃ/ church
/d / judge
Both of these sounds are palatal. Their articulation involves the front of
the tongue touching the hard palate. As the IPA symbols for these sounds
suggest, an affricate is the combination of a stop and a fricative. That is,
when these sounds are produced, the tongue causes complete blockage of
air. However, after the air is released, the tongue creates enough obstruc-
tion of the flow of air to create the kind of turbulence associated with a
fricative.
Approximants.
There are two types of approximants: central and later-
al. English has three central approximants:
/ɹ/ ripe
/j/ yet
/w/ wet
and one lateral approximant:
/l/ like
All four approximants are voiced. The phonemes /ɹ/ and /l/ are alveolar,
while /j/ is palatal. The phoneme /w/ is different from the other approxi-
mants in that its articulation is bilabial/velar. That is, as this sound is artic-
ulated, the lips narrow and the back of the tongue touches the soft palate.
Thus, the production of this sound involves two places of articulation. In
The sounds of English
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some dialects of English, it is possible to find a voiceless equivalent of /w/,
which is transcribed as / / and is typically found in words beginning with
the orthographic characters wh. For speakers who make the distinction,
the word witch would begin with /w/ and which with / /. While common in
earlier periods of English, the distinction between /w/ and / / is currently
maintained by relatively few speakers of English. With all four approxi-
mants, there is relatively little obstruction of the air in the oral cavity –
certainly much less than is found with fricatives. For this reason, the
approximants are sometimes regarded as semi-vowels, since the articula-
tion of vowels involves very little obstruction of the flow of air.